Call the fire department when if your house is on fire? Or your cat stuck in a lil’ tree?

Check out books from a public library?

Get your license renewed at the DMV?

Basked in the glory of clean floors and empty trashcans at the statehouse?

Used a Pell Grant to help pay for your degree at Fiscal Idiot State?

Watch the busted water main in front of your house get fixed?

Frolick in your favorite city park?

Do you, or will you, get a social security check in the mail?

Benefit from one of hundreds of other city, state, and federal services?

Yeah.

Thought so.

So next time you whine about losing all your hard earned money to those pork-barrel feds, remember that it’s not actually your money. It’s money you owe. You are paying for a variety of services you use everyday and for some reason feel entitled to have without supporting them monetarily so that they can function. I’m not naive enough to suggest that you benefit from every federally or state funded program — you don’t. But for every program out there that you either don’t believe in or don’t make use of, there’s another person out there who makes no use of a program that serves you. It’s called being a citizen. It’s called contributing a the greater good — a greater good that serves you every day in one way or another.

What really amuses me is that it’s the same people who decry taxes to pay for every day services that call programs like health care and welfare entitlement programs. Meanwhile, they don’t want to pay to support the services they use every day. Now that’s entitlement.

Wowza! It’s been a while since my last post. I guess it’s because I’ve been frolicking on tropical islands. Sorry kids.

But here’s another Dear God it’s what Rachel Thinks!!!

I’ve been thinking about the idea of introducing the concept of homosexuality to kids, especially very young kids. Many argue that they are not ready to hear about homosexuality.

But there’s an important distinction that needs to be made, and that is between introducing the idea of homosexuality, and the idea of homosexual sex

The reality is that kids learn about about heterosexuality from day one. Mom and Dad. Adam and Sarah next door. They learn about the concept of men and women being partners, and they do so, until probably age 6 or so, without learning about heterosexual sex. So when they do learn about sex, it comes with a background of a lifetime of seeing societally-sanctioned relationships. The sex is coupled with the partnership.

Then kids learn about homosexuality. But what’s the first thing they learn? They don’t learn that Adam and Rob are partners, they learn that Adam and Rob as people who have sex. Think back to the first time you heard about homosexuality. Was it about a 20 year relationship, or was it about fucking?

Homosexuals are introduced to children not as people who are partners, but as people who have sex with each other. When it’s only about sex, and not about partnership and love, it can be contorted to be a sin, immoral, depraved, and wrong with much greater ease. After all, the bible only condemns homosexual sex (or it is argued that it does), not going out for coffee with some hot girl you like. And the concept is also contrary to what kids have grown up learning. New things are scary.

Now what if we did this.

What if instead of showing our kids how men and women can be partners, and later reveal that they have sex, we show them that men and women can be partners, men and men can be partners, and women and women can be partners, and later, when kids are ready to learn about any kind of sex, we reveal it across the board.

That way, when people first get their impressions of homosexuality, it’s not of some depraved sex act. It’s of a healthy partnership, just like the one they learned about seeing Mom and Dad. Then when sex gets introduced, homosexuals will perhaps not be seen solely as sexually deviants, but as just normal people, who, well, happen to have sex.

Since this issue is one I take very seriously, I will spend most of the following dispelling American Thinker’s cute little quips than introducing my own. And I do so because this is what is wrong with the health care debate: no one really knows what the new health care plan is or what any of its components mean (I don’t even!). So instead of really partaking in intelligent discourse, we indulge in propaganda, scare tactics, out-of-context information, and flat out misconstructions of the truth intended to lead you in one direction while blinding you to the other half of the fork in the road. As such, this article and I are going to have a debate in another edition of Dear God it’s what Rachel Thinks

Article:

“Any or all of these will lead to a government takeover of the health care industry.”

DGIWRT:

Health care should not be an industry. No one should be profiting off of someone’s poor health, and decisions certainly should not be made with profit in mind.

Article: “Should your grandmother get a hip replacement? Go down the hall to the queue outside Office 37-B and fill out more forms. We’ll let you know in a few months. Hey, you with the brain tumor. Get back in line.”

DGIWRT:

Speaking as someone with a brain tumor, I can’t tell you how many doctors I had to see, referrals I had to beg for, insurance forms I had to fill out, monstrous copays I had to pay, and overall shitty treatment I received even on double coverage from the health care industry. Or maybe I can tell you. Oh wait, I don’t have a year of your time.

Furthermore, people who can’t afford insurance don’t even get to be in line

Article:

“A centralized system would give the government the power of life and death over America’s families”

DGIWRT:

How is government having the power over life and death any worse than an HMO having this power? The government is no more impersonal, the government is no more profit-seeking, the government is no more frugal, the government is no more misinformed.

Article:

“Such a system also reinforces the idea that government is God.”

DGIWRT:

You’re a paranoid propaganda peddling fuck

Article:

“Often treatment is not withheld altogether, but it is delayed, sometimes with the result that the patient’s condition worsens. … About 50 per cent had to wait over a month and 20 per cent more than three months. Over one in three of those waiting said that their condition had got worse while they were waiting and 14 per cent claimed to be ‘in a lot of pain.'”

DGIWRT:

I waited 9 months for a shoulder surgery. 9 months. You need to look at the present facts before peddling future fears

Article:

“Randy Stroup, 53, a cancer patient, applied for aid under Oregon’s state health plan in 2008. He got a letter denying payments for chemotherapy, but offering money to help him kill himself.”

DGIWRT:

This statement is strikingly misleading. First, the Oregon Health Plan was introduced in the 1990’s, at which point it was far more comprehensive than it is today (or in 2008) due to cutbacks because we would rather give subsidies to Portland General Electric than pay for chemotherapy. What this article doesn’t tell you is that the OHP expanded healthcare for thousands of Oregonians who were in a terrible limbo between not qualifying for medicare and not affording their own insurance. Furthermore, this man had less than a 5 percent chance of significant recovery. This was not a man that was denied arbitrarily. Yes, it would be wonderful if the state could pay for his chemotherapy. And since you agree, I’m sure you’d also agree to taking a small bite out of pentagon funding to do so.

Also, the fact that they would offer assisted-suicide is pretty irrelevant

And ten bucks says he petitioned the government because his private insurance wouldn’t cover his chemotherapy either. Or he didn’t have any to begin with.